You Can't Go Home Again (70 page)

“But, Mrs. Purvis,” George remarked presently, “do you think he’ll ever get married? I mean, do you really, now? After all, he’s no chicken any longer, is he? And he must have had lots of chances, and if he was going to do anything about it----”

“Ah!” said Mrs. Purvis, in that tone of somewhat lofty recognition that she always used at such a time. “
Ah!
What I always say to
that
is, ‘E
will!
‘E’ll make up ‘Is mind to it when ‘E ‘as to, but not before! ‘E won’t be driven into it, not ‘Im! But ‘E’ll do it when ‘E knows it is the proper time.”

“Yes, Mrs. Purvis, but what
is
the proper time?”

“Well,” she said, “after all, there
is
‘Is father, isn’t there? And ‘Is father is not as young as ‘e used to be,
is
‘e?” She was silent for a moment, diplomatically allowing the tactful inference to sink in by itself. “Well, sir,” she concluded very quietly, “I mean to say, sir, a time
will
come, sir, won’t it?”

“Yes, Mrs. Purvis,” George persisted, “but
will
it? I mean, can you be sure? You know, you hear all sorts of things—even a stranger like myself hears them. For one thing, you hear he doesn’t want it very much, and then, of course, there is his brother, isn’t there?”

“Oh,
‘im
,” said Mrs. Purvis, “
‘im!
” For a brief interval she remained silent, but had she filled an entire dictionary with the vocabulary of bitter and unyielding hostility, she could not have said more than she managed to convey in the two letters of that mutilated little pronoun “
‘im
.”

“Yes,” George persisted somewhat cruelly, “but after all, he
wants
it, doesn’t he?”

“‘E does,” said Mrs. Purvis grimly.

“And he
is
married, isn’t he?”

“‘E is,” said Mrs. Purvis, if anything a trifle more grimly than before.

“And
he
has children, hasn’t he?”

“‘E
‘as
, yes,” said Mrs. Purvis, somewhat more gently. In fact, for a moment her face glowed with its look of former tenderness, but it grew grim again very quickly as she went on: “But
‘im
! Not
‘im
!” She was deeply stirred by this imagined threat to the ascendancy of her idol. Her lips worked tremulously, then she shook her head with a quick movement of inflexible denial and said: “Not
‘im
.” She was silent for a moment more, as if a struggle were going on between her desire to speak and the cool barrier of her natural reserve. Then she burst out: “I tell you, sir, I never liked the look of ‘im! Not that one—no!” She shook her head again in a half-convulsive movement; then, in a tone of dark confidingness, she almost whispered: “There’s somethin’
sly
about ‘is face that I don’t like! ‘E’s a sly one, ‘e is, but ‘e don’t fool
me!
” Her face was now deeply flushed, and she nodded her head with the air of a person who had uttered her grim and final judgment and would not budge from it. “That’s my opinion, if you ask me, sir! That’s the way I’ve always felt about ‘im. And ‘er.
‘Er!
She
wouldn’t like it,
would
she? Not ‘arf she wouldn’t!” She laughed suddenly, the bitter and falsetto laugh of an angry woman. “Not
‘er!
Why, it’s plain as clay, it’s written all over ‘er! But a lot of good it’ll do ‘em,” she said grimly. “
We
know what’s what!” She shook her head again with grim decision. “The
people
know. They can’t be fooled. So let ‘em git along with it!”

“You don’t think, then, that they----”

“
Them!
” said Mrs. Purvis strongly. “
Them!
Not in a million years, sir! Never! Never!...‘E”—her voice fairly soared to a cry of powerful conviction—“‘E’s the one! ‘E’s
always
been the one! And when the time comes, sir,
‘E—‘E
will be King!”

In the complete and unquestioning loyalty of her character, Mrs. Purvis was like a large and gentle dog. Indeed, her whole relation to life was curiously animal-like. She had an intense concern for every member of brute creation, and when she saw dogs or horses in the streets she always seemed to notice first the animal and then the human being that it belonged to. She had come to know and recognise all the people in Ebury Street through the dogs they owned. When George questioned her one clay about a distinguished-looking old gentleman with a keen hawk’s face whom he had passed several times on the street, Mrs. Purvis answered immediately, with an air of satisfaction:

“Ah-h, yes. ‘E’s the one that ‘as the rascal in 27. Ah-h, and ‘e
is
a rascal, too,” she cried, shaking her head and laughing with affectionate remembrance. “Big, shaggy fellow ‘e is, you know, comin’ along, swingin’ ‘is big shoulders, and looking’ as if butter wouldn’t melt in ‘is mouth. ‘E is a
rascal
.”

George was a little bewildered by this time and asked her if she meant the gentleman or the dog.

“Oh, the dog,” cried Mrs. Purvis. “The dog! A big Scotch shepherd ‘e is. Belongs to the gentleman you were speakin’ of. Gentleman’s some sort of scholar or writer or professor, I believe. Used to be up at Cambridge. Retired now. Lives in 27.”

Or again, looking out of the window one day into the pea-soup drizzle of the street, George saw an astonishingly beautiful girl pass by upon the other side. He called Mrs. Purvis quickly, pointed out the girl, and excitedly demanded:

“Who is she? Do you know her? Does she live here on the street?”

“I can’t say, sir,” Mrs. Purvis answered, looking puzzled. “It seems I must ‘ave seen ‘er before, but I can’t be sure. But I will just keep my eyes open and I’ll let you know if I find out where she lives.”

A few days later Mrs. Purvis came in from her morning’s shopping tour, beaming with satisfaction and full of news. “Ah-h,” she said, “I ‘ave news for you. I found out about the girl.”

“What girl?” he said, looking up startled from his work.

“The girl you asked about the other day,” said Mrs. Purvis. “The one you pointed out to me.”

“Oh yes,” he said, getting up. “And what about her? Does shelive here in the street?”

“Of course,” said Mrs. Purvis. “I’ve seen ‘er a ‘undred times. I should ‘ave known ‘er in a second the other day, only she didn’t ‘ave
‘im
with ‘er.”

“Him? Who?”

“Why, the rascal down at 46. That’s who she is.”

“That’s who who is, Mrs. Purvis?”

“Why, the great Dane, of course. You must ‘ave seen
‘im
. ‘E’s big as a Shetland pony,” she laughed. “‘E’s always with ‘er. The only time I ever saw ‘er without ‘im was the other day, and that’s why,” she cried triumphantly, “I didn’t know ‘er. But to-day, they were out takin’ a walk together and I saw ‘em comin’...Then I knew who she was. They’re the ones in 46. And the rascal”—here shelaughed affectionately—“ah-h, what a rascal ‘e is! Oh, a fine fellow, you know. So big and strong ‘e is. I sometimes wonder where they keep ‘im, ‘ow they found a ‘ouse big enough to put ‘im in.”

Hardly a morning passed that she didn’t return from her little tour of the neighbourhood flushed with excitement over some new “rascal”, some “fine fellow”, some dog or horse she had observed and watched. She would go crimson with anger over any act of cruelty or indifference to an animal. She would come in boiling with rage because she had passed a horse that had been tightly bridled:

“...And I gave ‘im a piece of my mind, too,” she would cry, referring to the driver. “I told ‘im that a man as mistreated a hanimal in that way wasn’t fit to ‘ave one. If there’d been a constable about, I’d ‘ave ‘ad ‘im took in custody, that’s what I’d ‘ave done. I told ‘im so, too. Shockin’, I calls it. The way some people can b’ave to some poor, ‘elpless beast that ‘as no tongue to tell what it goes through. Let ‘em ‘ave a bridle in
their
mouth a bit! Let ‘em go round for a while with
their
faces shut up in a muzzle! Ah-h,” she would say grimly, as if the idea afforded her a savage pleasure, “that’d teach ‘em! They’d know then, all right!”

There was something disturbing and unwholesome about the extravagance of this feeling for animals. George observed Mrs. Purvis closely in her relations with people and found out that she was by no means so agitated at the spectacle of human suffering. Her attitude towards the poor, of whom she was one, was remarkable for its philosophic acceptance. Her feeling seemed to be that the poor are always with us, that they are quite used to their poverty, and that this makes it unnecessary for anybody to bother about it, least of all the miserable victims themselves. It had certainly never entered her head that anything should be done about it. The sufferings of the poor seemed to her as natural and as inevitable as the London fog, and to her way of thinking it was just as much a waste of honest emotion to get worked up about the one as about the other.

Thus, on the same morning that she would come in blazing with indignation over the mistreatment of a dog or horse, George would sometimes hear her speak sharply, curtly, and without a trace of feeling to the dirty, half-starved, and half-naked devil of a boy who always delivered the beer from the liquor shop. This wretched child was like some creature out of Dickens—a living specimen of that poverty which, at its worst, has always seemed to be lower and more degraded in England than anywhere else. The thing that gives it its special horror is that in England people of this type appear to be stogged to their misery, sucked down in a swamp of inherited wretchedness which is never going to be any better, and from which they know they can never escape.

So it was with this God-forsaken boy. He was one of the Little People—that race of dwarfs and gnomes which was suddenly and’ terribly revealed to George that winter in London. George discovered that there arc really two different orders of humanity in England, and they are so far apart that they hardly seem to belong to the same species. They are the Big People and the Little People.

The Big People are fresh-skinned, ruddy, healthy, and alert; they show by their appearance that they have always had enough to eat. At their physical best, they look like great bulls of humanity. On the streets of London one sees these proud and solid figures of men and women, magnificently dressed and cared for, and one observes that their faces wear the completely vacant and imperturbable expressions of highly bred cattle. These are the British Lords of Creation. And among the people who protect and serve them, and who are really a part of their own order, one also sees some magnificent specimens—strapping Guardsmen, for example, six feet five inches tall and as straight as lances, with the same assured look in their faces, which says plainly that though they may not be the Lords of Creation themselves, at any rate they are the agents and instruments of the Lords.

But if one stays in England long enough, all of a sudden one day he is going to discover the Little People. They are a race of gnomes who look as if they have burrowed in tunnels and lived for so many centuries in underground mines that they have all become pale and small and wizened. Something in their faces and in the gnarled formations of their bodies not only shows the buried lives they live, but also indicates that their fathers and mothers and grandparents for generations before them were similarly starved of food and sunlight and were bred like gnomes in the dark and deep-delved earth.

One hardly notices them at first. But then, one day, the Little People swarm up to the surface of the earth, and for the first time one sees them. That is the way the revelation came to George Webber, and it was an astounding discovery. It was like a kind of terrible magic to realise suddenly that he had been living in this English world and seeing only one part of it, thinking it was the whole. It was not that the Little People were few in number. Once he saw them, they seemed to be almost the whole population. They outnumbered the Big People ten to one. And after he saw them, he knew that England could never look the same to him again, and that nothing he might read or hear about the country thereafter would make sense to him if it did not take the Little People into account.

The wretched boy from the liquor shop was one of them. Everything about him proclaimed eloquently that he had been born dwarfed and stunted into a world of hopeless poverty, and that he had never had enough to eat, or enough clothes to warm him, or enough shelter to keep the cold fogs from seeping through into the very marrow of his bones. It was not that he was actually deformed, but merely that his body seemed to be shrivelled and shrunk and squeezed of its juices like that of an old man. He may have been fifteen or sixteen years old, though there were times when he seemed younger. Always, however, his appearance was that of an under-grown man, and one had the horrible feeling that his starved body had long since given up the unequal struggle and would never grow any more.

He wore a greasy, threadbare little jacket, tightly buttoned, from the sleeves of which his raw wrists and large, grimy, work-reddened hands protruded with almost indecent nakedness. His trousers, tight as a couple of sausage skins, were equally greasy and threadbare, and were inches too short for him. His old and broken shoes were several sizes too big, and from the battered look of them they must have helped to round the edges of every cobble-stone in stony-hearted London. This costume was completed by a shapeless old hulk of a cap, so large and baggy that it slopped over on one side of his head and buried the ear.

What his features were like it was almost impossible to know, because he was so dirty. His flesh, what one could see of it through the unwashed grime, had a lifeless, opaque pallor. The whole face was curiously blurred and blunted, as if it had been moulded hastily and roughly out of tallow. The nose was wide and flat, and turned up at the end to produce great, flaring nostrils. The mouth was thick and dull, and looked as if it had been pressed into the face with a blunt instrument. The eyes were dark and dead.